For the first time all five winners of the Costa Book Awards are women. Three
cheers, says Sameer Rahim.

It feels like a watershed moment sure to get people talking: for the first time in its history women have won all five Costa Book Awards. But look a little closer and the winners in each category are hardly controversial.

Few will be surprised that Hilary Mantel’s all-conquering Tudor sequel Bring Up the Bodies – which won the Man Booker Prize and sold 196,340 hardback copies in 2012 – was awarded the best novel award.

Poetry winner Kathleen Jamie is an established nature writer whose collection The Overhaul is considered her finest yet.

Francesca Segal’s Edith Wharton-inspired first novel winner, The Innocents, set in Hampstead Garden Suburb, is both elegant and clever.

The Telegraph’s children’s books editor Lorna Bradbury described the winner of the children’s prize Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon – which is narrated by a boy with dyslexia – as the “outstanding teenage novel of the autumn”.

It would be remiss if I did not point out that the biography category winner, Mary Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, is co-written with a man: her husband Bryan Talbot. It tells the story of Mary’s upbringing as the daughter of a James Joyce scholar, alongside the life story of Joyce’s mentally unstable daughter Lucia. With a title taken from Finnegans Wake and its graphic form, it’s a bolder choice than another of the shortlisted titles: Artemis Cooper’s Life of explorer Patrick Leigh Fermor. But even if that very different work had won, we would still have an all-female list.

Perhaps that tells us something instructive. So varied are the winning works, I doubt the judges even noticed that the authors they have honoured were the same gender.

Now that the 2012 Man Booker, Forward and Costas have all gone to women, does the existence of a female-only Orange Prize still make sense? The prize organisers are currently searching for a new sponsor and this year will be privately funded. The ingrained sexism that the founders set the Orange up to tackle seems to have vanished.

The Costa List might, however, be an anomaly: as recently as 2011 the Forward Poetry Prize had an all-male shortlist.

I should also mention that three of the five Costa winners have male protagonists – evidence, if we needed it, that the authors are pursuing the stories that interest them and do not feel in the slightest inhibited their gender. Neither should their readers.